Monthly Archives: October 2012

As a legal historian I thought I would share something this week from Penn’s collections that demonstrates both the frustrations and excitement of working with legal historical sources. A few weeks ago, the curator of manuscripts brought to my attention an uncataloged volume from the stacks which was known only to be some sort of “legal formulary” (now fully cataloged by Amey Hutchins as UPenn Ms. Codex 1628). Formularies, as their name suggests, are form books used by lawyers or others to record the particular language required for various legal proceedings. A formulary might then include forms for writing out deeds, conveying livestock, issuing a summons, etc. These might be taken from printed books of forms intended to guide lawyers or from manuscript documents used in actual practice and copied for later use [1]. From this description it’s easy to see why formularies don’t receive a lot of attention. They are often absurdly dull tomes full of a mishmash of legalese never meant to be read front to back but dipped into for templates by a practicing lawyer. I’m excited by nearly anything having to do with 18th century law but I have to admit having low expectations when I decided to investigate.

What I found instead was an ideal window onto the practice of law in the crucial period between the end of British rule in Pennsylvania and the rise of the new United States.

The very first page of the formulary (illustrated right) helped identify its owner and sometime author: Jared Ingersoll, Jr. (1749-1822). Ingersoll was one of the most prominent lawyers in the early American republic as well as a signer of the Constitution and later Attorney General of Pennsylvania. Originally from Connecticut, Ingersoll graduated from Yale and moved to Philadelphia around 1770 where he lived for the rest of his life except for 5 years in London (1773-78). Ms. Codex 1628 includes writing in several different hands but it seems more than likelythat the first 153 pages (all in the same hand) were written by Ingersoll himself as a young lawyer [2].

One doesn’t have to look much further than the opening page (above) to understand what kinds of material ended up in an early American form book. This first page contains a template to be used by the customs officer of Philadelphia for filing a bill to seize enslaved Africans brought to Pennsylvania without customs duties being paid. Note above the highlighted portions where particular names are omitted by Ingersoll for the template (e.g. “a certain ship called the ____”).

The appearance of documents like the one above raises a tricky question about what we can say based on a formulary. Does the presence of this form mean that young Philadelphia lawyers expected to deal with a number of slave-importation cases, or is it more emblematic of a desire to exhaustively document extant legal procedure no matter how common? In addition, while it seems reasonable to assume, given the presence of some specific dates in the form, that it was copied by Ingersoll from an actual bill filed for the seizure of enslaved persons, formularies also contain forms prepared for use but never actually used. The information contained within them then cannot always be taken at face value.

Information for Felony in the Negro Court of Philadelphia County (UPenn Ms Codex 1628, p.103)

A more telling example of this problem comes on page 103 of the manuscript which contains a form for an “information” (similar to an indictment) for use by the “Negro Court” of Philadelphia. It may or may not record the details of an actual case before this specialized court. It includes placeholders for the names of the six white and property owning ‘jurors’ who were to try the case. The form does include specific language for a plausible crime, the theft of “one worsted pocket book” on the streets of Philadelphia, but includes Ingersoll’s note “here insert the Goods Stolen & their Value.”

“…that a certain Male Negro Called Weed the Slave of MM late of the County of Philadelphia Gentlewoman the 8th day of January A.D. 1768 at Philadelphia County aforesaid & within the Jurisdiction of this Court with force & arms &c one Worsted Pocket Book of the value of 4/(here insert the Goods Stolen & their Value)…”

I first encountered Ms. Codex 1552, Vade mecum, at a meeting of the English Paleography Workshop. A group of Penn librarians, graduate students, and faculty; scholars and graduate students from other institutions; area librarians, book-dealers, and other interested parties joined Amey Hutchins in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt for a special after-hours session.

This manuscript is a small, compact, portable volume that contains medicinal recipes. The volume also includes some Biblical verses and other miscellaneous material. One of the most interesting features of this manuscript is a pair of seventeenth-century poems that appear across a single opening near the end of the volume. Our Paleography Workshop persevered in reading the first poem on the verso by carefully deciphering the difficult script (a rushed secretary hand), decoding the topical references to Parliament and John Pym, MP and erstwhile head of the majority in Parliament, and discussing the place of that poem within a recipe book. Since then I’ve returned to the manuscript and completed my own transcription of both poems (included below). In my current research I’m interested in the ways topical or occasional poems rub shoulders with other kinds of texts in seventeenth-century manuscript and print culture. And in fact, I’ve discovered that this manuscript has had far more contact with the world of print than one would realize from first glance: both poems appeared in print during the seventeenth-century.

The poem on the verso, “We fasted first, then praid that warr might cease,” (f.115v) is firmly anti-Parliament.

We fasted first,then praid that warr might cease when prer woold not serue wee p[ai]d for peaceAnd glad we had it so, and gaue god thanks.which makes thy Irish play the Scottish pranksis there no god lett it put that to uoteis there no church some fools say so by roteis there no Kinge but pimm for to assentfor what is done by act of Parliamentno god-no Church, no king, then all were wellthat could but enact tyrannous hell

A full-text search on Early English Books Online revealed that the first line of this poem closely matches a poem included in a Restoration-era collection of seventeenth-century Royalist verse edited by Alexander Brome, Rump Songs (1662)[1]. In Rump Songs the poem is called “The Rump’s Hypocrisy” and the text includes some variations. While I would still agree with the Penn cataloger that this poem was likely composed in the early 1640s, it does also have an afterlife in a Royalist verse collection as well as in Ms. Codex 1552. Continue reading →

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Welcome to Unique at Penn, part of the family of University of Pennsylvania Libraries blogs. Every week this space will feature descriptions and contextualization of items from the collections of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. The site focuses on those materials held by Penn which are in some sense “unique” - drawn from both our special and circulating collections, whether a one-of-a-kind medieval manuscript or a twentieth-century popular novel with generations of student notes penciled inside. See the About page for more on the blog and to contact the editor.

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